Enseigné par

Dr William Cope

Professor

Dr Mary Kalantzis

Professor

Transcription

In this section, we're going to talk about making visual meanings. So we've spoken about written meanings, and we've noted that in our society, in the modern world, meaning made with writing is a very privileged domain. And we know that reading or writing is a very linear thing. It's constructed in a line, one thing after the other. The reader follows the writer, usually, and particularly good at representing time and causal connections. Writing does that very well. So what is Visual Meaning Making? And what are the cases we going to make instead in growing in significance and in circulation. Visual Meaning involves seeing the whole picture all it once. And the viewer is looking across at the image. Usually in their own way but starting with what first captures their attention. And these two in Visual Meaning is a designed element. And thirdly, Visual Meanings are particularly good at representing space at one moment but also they can have a montage of time. Now, there's something I want to say about Visual Meaning and why it's becoming most significant to us. I want you to think back about all the news that occurred about Abu Ghraib. But, at that time, the Red Cross had written a report about what was happening at the prison in Abu Ghraib, a very detailed report. It was circulating around the world. It was on the Internet. Governments had seen it. But it really had had no impact although it was written in perfect, alphabetical literacy. Somebody went into the prison, took one picture, and that one picture if you recall which captured in a moment a big story about what was happening there, had an impact on presidents, on prime ministers, on governments all around the world. That we are responding to the visual in a much more powerful way than ever it's having an effect in policy making in meaning making in communicating very powerfully. You can have any kind of example that nowadays they can show you that. Policing also that is now captured on video, that communicates very powerfully, much more powerfully than any other kind of form. The Instagram, which we use to communicate quickly with each other, in that one image that we take, and send to our friends, our coworkers, whatever, it captures everything in one little moment, and tells people what we're doing and where we are. And visual meaning increasingly becoming a preferred way of making powerful statements in the world. But I want to say that both written meanings and visual meanings are visual, in a sense that writing is something that you can see in the same way that you can see a picture. And increasingly in the multimodal texts that are on our screens and in other renderings, writing and visual meaning come together in powerful ways. We need to remember as Gunter Cress tells us that children draw before they write, and increasingly now, drawing and writing images and texts are coming together in powerful ways. >> In this section, we're going to talk about making visual meanings. And the broad context is we've spent a few centuries probably since about the 15th to 16th Century actually. Privileging writing. So, the three R's of school, reading and writing are rhythmic, two of those involve writing. So, and what we did actually, with the invention of the printing press, we created a technology for representing meanings over distances. Which separated images away from texts. You know, the process of lithography and the process of letter-press printing were two different processes, which usually meant that happened on different pages in the book. But, culturally we privilege writing as a means of communication as well. A very simple example, you know, in schools is that when you were a little kid, you read picturebooks, and when you were grown up, you read chapterbooks, which were just words. And so that was more serious. That was more what academic writing was supposed to be. In sort of high theory, in social theory In the last quarter of the 20th century was this phenomenon called the language turn. Where they thought that our identities, the way we think, everything in the world was all the creature of language. So we've had this kind of emphasis on language for a long long time. But now we're in a moment, particularly with the Internet, where so much of the Internet is visual. We're in a moment which is sometimes called the visual turn. Now we have much more visual communication going on. And we're doing that ourselves, I mean, you know, whereas to speak with our family and friend. A generational to a girl we might got on the telephone and we might have spoken, or we might have written a letter, they're both linguistic events. Now with Instagram and with Facebook, what we're doing is we're posting images and putting a caption underneath. The primary medium is actually the image. There's text connected to it, but it's not written text in those traditional forms. The original form of the telephone conversation or the traditional form of the letter. So, the reason why we've taken this multi-literacy approach to literacy Is that images are now so important and texts and images a very closely into link. And also in schools what we did is we had a subject called literacy which was highly privileged and a subject called art which really wasn't privilege. But the more interesting thing about which one was privileged in relation to the other, art typically wasn't compulsory but English or Language or Literacy was, is the fact they were separate subjects, completely different logics, media, separate subjects. When now in the world, in fact, to represent what we know and to communicate Image and text are often very closely related. And perhaps these shouldn't be quite such separate subjects.